Clearly Now, the Rain (4 page)

When I tried to talk about it—both the sight of the dead man himself and the nightmares that came later—my host mother would wave her slender hands in a cancelling motion, rub at the crucifix on her neck. My fellow students would rotate their faces sharply away from my words like birds. Though Samar and my father were sympathetic, the buzz of the interminable phone line brought me no tangible empathy. Serala was unreachable except by the pen but I had the assurance that when the words fell, she could catch them, and that made all the difference.

Five

That summer my dad stretched his strained credit—to say nothing of his destroyed body—and took my brother and me and our ten-year-old Lab, Sky, to the borderlands of Minnesota. We spent a week portaging and rowing through countless lakes with Dad's old friends, catching walleye and roasting them on campfires. My dad was determined and strong, plodding up steep slopes with his cane, fatigue and pride alternating on his face. Evenings, Luke and I would take a canoe and circle whatever little island we'd planted ourselves on for the night. Ostensibly we were fishing, but mainly it was a chance to smoke joints, practice Spanish, and talk about Dad.

Luke's sinewy arm whips back with the rod and I dodge the yellow lure, nearly dropping the joint.

Cuidado! Shithead.

Luke gives me a stoned giggle by way of apology. The lure plinks into the mirror of black water thirty yards away and he leans against the middle bar in the canoe, reaches back for the joint. We both gaze toward shore where Dad is trying to navigate a steep slope at the bottom of which Sky's bright blue racquetball bobs in the water. Sky stares at the ball and back at my dad in the same way she looks at the walleye coming out of the fire. Dad missteps and slides on his right heel a couple of feet, then gets his cane planted and rights himself, shockingly.

Whoa!
Luke exclaims, like we're watching a sporting event.

Dad, presumably stilling his heart, pauses before the main event of bending over to retrieve the ball and casts his eyes out to us. He's wondering if we saw. I wave; Luke throws a thumbs-up. Dad wags his cane, apparently proud of not falling rather than pissed at himself about slipping.

You think that Dad got what he was looking for?

The question blindsides me.

You mean even though he smashed himself to bits?

I intend the question to be sardonic, but as it comes I realize it's genuine, this notion. Luke nods, swings the lure, toting a length of lake slime into the canoe. He turns and faces me over the tackle, wrestling with a blue spinner.

I don't know, dude. But I'll tell you this much—he's probably way too stubborn to ever give up now that he's fought this hard.

Luke bobs his head and smiles. I don't tell him that there have been times when I did very much think Dad was going to give up.

Plink, splash. The racquetball hits the water and Sky is en route. Luke's blue spinner is a dazzling arc in the afternoon sun. Dad waves again when he sees me looking, just leaning on his cane watching his sons—afloat.

On the road home we stop at Glacier National Park. While my father and brother and Sky goof around under a roaring waterfall, I sit on a rock and let the Montana sun spread a burn on my shoulders. I can listen to the near voices of my dad and Luke, the pound of the water on rock. Far below a gust of wind clears the throat of a canyon. The lowing of a boat in the lake rises up. But these are sounds that are more like silence—just a backdrop.

Serala had once seen this country, had known it more intimately than she would have wished: the cobalt blue water, the mountains scooped out, as if by a celestial spoon. Her folks had sent her off, one winter, to the reformatory power of Outward Bound, a survival course meant to knock the trouble out of kids. It was because of her forays into drugs that she was sent (though I doubt her family knew the extent of those forays). She'd fought through it like a champ, blowing off the two-pack a day habit, not to mention the drugs—as did the other torn-up teenagers around her, deprived of other options besides reform school or Juvie. She bent stoically to those weeks in the altitudes where, five people to a tent, one had to be cranking out sit-ups to transfer warmth to the others—all night long.

I was wired on hope that summer. I reclined on that Montana rock, fresh from ten days of watching my father refuse the straightjacket of disability and live, when only a year before he had plummeted nine stories and been expected to die at countless moments. I was just months departed from my ultimately successful journey to Venezuela where I'd survived alienhood, learned Spanish, and even come to love solitude. Likewise I carried a stack of Serala's letters from the Old World in my worn JanSport pack, wrinkled pages of blue ink that contained a renewal of determination between the lines. If I'd held back some with her in the past it was because loving her frightened me; while her friendship and loyalty were incalculably valuable, the liability of losing her to the darkness of addiction and its attendant hazards was comparably huge. But I read enough resilience into her letters—perhaps because I wanted to—that I believed she, too, was renewed and would return, like me, stronger. My own narcotics were hope and faith, born of my father's triumph over death and disability, Serala's triumph over all the darkness that had tried to drown her over the years, my own triumph over insecurity and lonesomeness in Venezuela. I was inebriated on this brightness on that flat rock in Glacier National Park while all my blessings shimmered around me like the diamonds of water floating free of the waterfall and catching the sun. I even decided to move in with Samar in September—it felt as if everything in the world could work out.

I love that cocksure twenty-year-old, but mostly I envy him. I'm glad I didn't yet know a thing about the flawed biochemistry of my own brain, which would slam a cage down over my entire world in a few months' time. I'm glad I didn't know what was coming for my father: little pink pills and a blooming death wish. I'm glad I didn't know about the origins of Serala's struggle then either.

Despite glimpses, the magnitude of her trauma and the force of her ghosts were still clothed in vagaries. I could fathom the abstractions of “abuse” and “addiction”; I could even guess at how rough it must have been for her to wrestle with the fallout of those things in the context of a traditional Indian family. If I'd known then the depth of her pain, I might not have allowed the libations of hope to swoon my head that summer.

I learned it all much later—the broad brushstrokes, anyway, something about the events that had gotten her shipped to Montana years before. And I took those brushstrokes and I filled in the rest for myself, inevitably and probably wrongly:

She's sixteen, doing the suburban teen summer thing in Connecticut—serving sandwiches to sunburned mall goers. She has been bound in the loose standards of Grateful Dead music, sundresses, overalls and the East Coast's bad weed. But the angst that defaces most adolescents has erupted in her. She's turned toward the darker allure of Nirvana, the nihilism, the world-damning cynicism—toward this mini-culture of my own home, Seattle, where at that age I am happily oblivious with my hip-hop, classic rock, and cheap beer. There's an older girl that she works with, a tall, severe beauty who slaps bread and cold cuts together and squeezes mustard bottles with a dull violence. This girl plays with her nose ring and stares into the distance, or sneaks out for cigarettes when the manager goes on break. She makes Serala nervous; Serala admires her. When the older girl speaks to her, Serala does her best to sound worldly, caustic, and older. When this young woman watches Serala change into her banana yellow apron out of a Nirvana T-shirt one day, she nonchalantly invites her to a party. Serala keeps her cool, shrugs, and tosses her hair, casually agrees. But secretly she's overjoyed and hoping that she'll get a stronger taste of this glimpsed world. She's already admitted to a couple of friends that she wants to try heroin, that she imagines herself adult enough to dabble and suck the pleasure carefully from the experience.

At the party there is the wailing and bleats of some grunge band or another ripping the speakers, people lounging with half-lidded eyes or chopping powder, loosing those maniacal cocaine laughs. Serala sits in a corner, smokes, and tries to look unconcerned. When the man sidles up and offers her a taste, she's suddenly scared, her theatrics are faltering. A metallic taste climbs her throat as she looks at the coolly disguised urgency in his face, the distance in his glassy eyes. But she glimpses her coworker studying her from across the room. Plus, the allure of the forbidden tugs in her belly and she says,
yeah, sure, why not,
and allows him to lead her into a bedroom lit by a bulb with towels nailed over the windows.

Her pulse is racing as he cooks up a spoonful, talking nonstop to her, quiet and kindly, promising that
she will love it, that she'll never be the same
, that it is, for him,
the best part of life
. When he turns her skinny arm under the bulb and pinches at a vein, perhaps she tries to pull away, perhaps she's flooded with flight juice, perhaps she begins to argue or plead, a child suddenly frightened by a bully's tricky game. Or perhaps not.

I imagine that first time, when the spike that will bind her bites and the rush comes through her like a transfusion from an angel, that her head falls back into the pillow that the empty space in the room has suddenly become. I imagine that it's so good that even as he pulls her clothes from her, she enjoys the sensation of air moving over her skin, that she's unaware that he's no longer cool, no longer slow and careful but fast, somewhat angry, and that his hands are closed around her arms. I imagine—perhaps because I want to—that she is absent and free. I imagine that the horror and the shame only break like the dawn does, well after the facts are in. I imagine that by the time she is home, running the shower to get it hot, to wash off the filth of that vanished man, she sees her eyes in the fogging mirror and finds nothing but a deep silence in them. Because she's discovered something terrible: she can endure what has just happened—and not even make a sound.

Six

Back at Sage Hill in September, in the ascetic basement dorm room Serala has christened the Batcave, we sit and smoke, sifting through her notes from Europe. A blear has ruined the sky, I am nursing a tequila hangover, and she is quieter than usual. I'm vaguely frightened of the things she might tell me about France; I've ascertained that the relative cheer and optimism I read between the lines of her letters rotted and fell away nearly as soon as she returned stateside—certainly by the time we returned to Riverside. The worst thing was not Monty's repeated cheating while she was away, but it wounded her more than I might have guessed.

Read this,
she says,
this is how I feel
.

I was honored to be allowed to see the human, scorned-lover kind of pain that was antithetical to her act.

Well, I think you've nailed down how it feels, I say carefully. I mean I know how it felt when I got cheated on. He's a fucker, you know?

He could have done worse, you know.
A pull off a Pall Mall, blown through her bedroom window.
Everyone slips—don't I know it
. A long pause and her eyes turn to a far corner.
I can't shop for gems when I've got no cash, you know?

On a gloomy October evening at an outside table at St. Charles Café, I ask Serala if the poetry she's writing helps her spirit, if she feels more human laying it down. She says
no
, sharp as a rifle crack, and I say,
That's bullshit
. She has a drag of smoke in her lungs. She turns bloodshot, unslept eyes on me that ask:
How dare you—who do you think you are?
The waiter grabs a dish and turns away and she says, bittersweetly,
Fuck you
,
Eli Hastings,
and I smile and she fights her smile, but loses.

There were so many times when one of us stopped on the edge of the unsaid and we were synched enough to know the rest of the sentence—maybe that was good enough. A nod and a swallow of wine, the gaze breaking away only with effort, but still a table between us, still tables of strangers to rein us in. I remember looking away those moments, at the peak of one of our exchanges, and catching a half dozen pairs of strangers' eyes before they could turn away, back to pork chops and salads and gumbo.

So I'll say now all the things that I didn't say explicitly then, to make damn sure it's not only Serala's dirty laundry that's hung across these pages: with the autumn came the inverse of all the healthy, hard-won faith of the summer. I was driving some nights with eight kids in the Buick, the top down, on Route
66
and off again to the side streets, a fifth of tequila in my body, racing other blacked-out men, no idea where the car was in the morning. My father was hurtling downward again too, brushing death, risking his life and others' everyday, driving through the narcotic fuzz of OxyContin self-righteously, because he wasn't sure he cared anymore. And I was learning of the futility of changing others when I couldn't even answer the dark questions boiling in me. Because there were times I got so sad without knowing why that it whispered over into rage and I found myself in the kitchen with a knife against my hand, amid smashed dishes and overturned furniture in Samar's cookie-cutter apartment. There were times in those months when I let the sick giddiness—like going up on psychedelics—ride its way through my mind and I could picture me and my convertible arching against the sunset, dropping hundreds of feet down an Angeles canyon to an end that fit my inexplicable fury.

On an April night in 1999 the Santa Ana winds are coming across the hot land like kind spirits. It is a mundane Friday evening: I find myself at a house party where we're packed in like a suitcase of elbows. Because of events of freshman year, Samar considers the host of this party, Alicia, to be her nemesis. That night, feeling careless or perhaps destructive, I toss off my hesitation and chat with Alicia as long as I please—even after I see Samar come through the door with stupefaction which quickly turns toward murder in her eyes.

With enough beer, and my back to the kitchen where Samar has vanished, I manage to really forget her, and to enjoy catching up with Alicia. When I enter the bathroom, I pause to check myself out in the mirror before pissing, which is damn lucky because Samar crashes through the door and lands blows on my head and chest before I wrestle her out. A good third of the party has gone awkward for what they've witnessed when Samar comes stomping back through.

Somehow I feel calm—enough to piss, wash my hands, look at my eyes in the mirror again. In Samar's wake, people give me glares or shake their heads in sympathy, depending on their allegiance. Outside, she is sitting on a rock in the garden, hands clutched over her head. She speaks before I can.

Fuck you. It's over, fuck you.
Tugging at her dreadlocks.

Samar, why don't you try to calm down.

You asshole—fuck you, it's over.
She will not look up; people are clearing away.

Samar, you don't get to take this back tomorrow
. I realize, only as it comes out, that I mean it.

It's over.
She almost whispers.

It's not violent, even a little soft. And I know it's true, just as well as I know that she won't want it to be in the morning. And I finish my bottle, point myself toward Serala's dorm—some two miles north—look at down at my feet, and start walking.

In the common room of her “suite”—as they euphemistically called them—a good-hearted drunk from Zimbabwe and my friend Marshall are drinking forty-ounce bottles of Olde English and watching
Cops
. I slump down next to them, just feet shy of her bedroom door.

Marsh, is there still an empty bedroom at your house?

Yup.

Can I move in tomorrow?

Word.

Thanks.

He hands me the forty and I take a swallow, knock knuckles half-heartedly, and lurch toward Serala's door, knocking with my forehead.

Given all the things that might have been transpiring at
3
A.M.
in the Batcave, I should be glad I only interrupt wine, hash, and Portishead. But I'm not thinking that then; I'm thinking—strangely, as her eyes find me, and then in silence she puts her arms around me, and Monty kindly steps out, and I begin to weep—that I am home.

As the door clicks behind him, we are left in the penumbra of a desk lamp with a scarf thrown over it. As that first round of tears runs out, I feel sheepish. When I lower my hand from my eyes and turn around, Serala has opened her bed, folded the covers back. Her stuffed parrot is on the pillows, waiting to comfort me, and so is she: sitting on the bared space of the futon, knees drawn up, ashing her Pall Mall onto her jeans and rubbing it away with a finger. She catches my eye with a look that is knowing and comforting, her jaw slack and still; she knows exactly what the ledger of damage reads.

She pats the futon and I undress mechanically, then climb in and attempt to smile up at her as she tucks me in, the blanket to my chin. Fred the parrot goes beneath my arm and her hand combs through my hair over the course another cigarette. The shadows are deep around her face but in the glow of one long drag, I catch a shimmer of a tear. With her last lingering touch she says,
Rest, love,
and departs with a click of the stereo's play button.

She shows up with coffees in the midmorning. She is quiet and just hugs me for a while and smokes. Feeling embarrassed, I sip the black coffee and avoid her eyes, squinting through the screen at the already hot day. But as she watches my profile I can tell that she's worried. With her, “worry” isn't quite the right word, of course. She doesn't think I'll do anything too terribly self-destructive. It's just empathy: pain at seeing me hurt, concern about what is going on inside.

Then she says:

Let's get you out of that apartment.

At the complex, she leaves me in the car while she knocks on the door and, somehow, convinces Samar to go across the parking lot to a neighbor's place.

I'm on my knees on the dirty carpet, swiping CDs, looking around at the cramped apartment, inextricable lives festooned and cluttered. But Serala's a storm of motion, whirling through the place, finding masking tape and rubber bands and by luck or instinct little cardboard boxes, stopping only to touch a match to another smoke and once to put Mississippi John Hurt on the stereo, loud. It's less than twenty minutes before she has things boxed and bagged, labeled and dated, and piled at the door, all the while checking to make sure Samar isn't on her way back.

As we are about to gather the last of my minimal belongings, Serala closes the door on the bleach of California sun and turns me by my arms to face her. She massages my shoulders like a manager does his boxer; she smiles big and though it is forced, it isn't fake.

You ready, champ?
She asks, switching one palm to my cheek. I swallow the tears and nod.
We don't have all day, you know—there's drinking to do!

And we put on our shades and fill our arms and walk out.

As we pull away, I allow myself a glance at Samar, standing across the parking lot, arms folded, in her pose, glaring—but not with the heat I'd expected.

Through the latter years' prism of antidepressants, forays into talk therapy, and a several-year dedication to meditation, I can say that the way Serala engaged the chaotic and dangerous sadness that reared up in me was not orthodox, nor solution-based. She never said to me,
You know, Eli, your behavior is really self-destructive and you should consider talking to someone.
From a psycho-medical point of view, particularly for someone who had already fenced with legions of shrinks and swallowed dozens of trial medications, Serala was decidedly silent on the topic of “treatment,” possibly because she had already ceased to believe in a biochemical explanation of her own hurt—and possibly because she did not want a “solution” to her own hurt. She never said so plainly but maybe she didn't even believe in medical explanations for sorrow and rage. And that's not what I needed then, that no-nonsense but delicate talk about “getting help” that anyone might have sat me down for.

I think she saw in me a social and spiritual ailment that she related to far too well and this identification was one of the great comforts of my life, nothing less. She shined this light in my face. There was no reason for how blue I got. I was a healthy, intelligent, well-loved, privileged white man in America and I was merely drowning; it was fucking banal. The more accounts of American-bankrolled genocide in Central America that I read, the more I learned about how deeply my own complicity in the bloodiness of American imperialism ran, the more ruptured my sleep became, the tighter my chest constricted, the quicker I was to useless acts and statements of rage. It was the process of learning that my privilege and comfort comes at a grave cost that others pay. Perhaps the root of my blues has always been biochemical, but if so, the political education I was receiving and the appalling leisure that I, and everyone around me, was living worsened the chemical blue considerably.

Serala made me feel sane and right for hurting, instead of weak, disturbed, melodramatic, and lonely. It was massively comforting to realize that there was someone else in my life that was also laid low by how wrong the world is. Much of my fear bloomed and much of my sadness permutated from watching people waltz through a deteriorating planet and a cutthroat world with shit-eating grins, including many right at my side who were learning about the same horror and injustice. And so I'd felt crazy at times for my incapacity to wear one of those grins consistently, too.

She gave me reason for my pain, sometimes on note cards secreted in my backpack.

We exist amid people doing horrible shit to each other, Eli, and some people can deflect it all. You and I can ignore it, but we can't keep it out of us. It seeps in just like the air out here—and just like the sweet does when we're driving and laughing, too, or listening to Bruce [Springsteen] and drinking something good. It does work both ways, it's just that there's a lot more shit on the whole, love.

I'd stayed with Samar as long as I had—despite the near-violence, the jealousy, the toxicity of our match—because I felt guilty. I was terrified of what would happen if I pulled the trigger: afraid, primarily, that she would hurt herself, either deliberately or unconsciously. And so I chose the path of least resistance and stayed. Suffered, and boiled, and worsened the blackness that was metastasizing in my head and my soul during that time. Again, Serala never had to say it plainly, and if she had, I probably wouldn't have heard it. She said it by action, by ushering me to that apartment to empty it and welcoming me to her space instead:
The hard road is often the right one, and, moreover, the kindest thing you can do for Samar is to leave
. It wasn't a lesson that stuck, sadly, but it was a lesson that freed me from a relationship that might well have been the final ingredient in a volatile emotional cocktail.